Desire and fear appear to pull us in opposite directions, but both persist through the distance they seek to overcome.
Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.
We are not outside the world we are trying to understand. We are (all) implicated in its disorders, participants in its reproduction, and responsible for what happens next.
Communication systems can make an interpretation familiar before it has been examined, significant before it has been understood, and consequential before anyone establishes whether it is true.
An institution’s measure is not how successfully it preserves itself or claims success, but whether it continues to serve its human purpose.
The AI business model converts new capabilities into dependencies, then turns the resulting risks, maintenance burdens and failures into reasons for further investment.
We have become exceptionally capable of reproducing (our, collective) insecurity in the name of security.
The climate is not obliged to change at a pace convenient to those living within it.
Political systems are historical constructions, not immutable necessities. Their persistence does not establish their continuing adequacy.
Categories
Students Walk Out Against One Nation
The student walkout against One Nation points to a larger problem: the affective politics of cultivated antagonism that has become disconcertingly effective as a technologically-mediated, commercially-leveraged narrative system.
A civilisation increasingly governed by visibility mistakes popularity for substance.
A spider’s book lungs pack an immense surface for exchange into a tiny space. Across lungs, brains, cells and information, the same principle recurs: internal structure multiplies what a finite system can do.
